Here is what I have done, and if by chance I have used some immaterial embellishment it has only been to fill a void due to defect of memory. I may have taken for fact what was no more than probability, but I have never put down as true what I knew to be false. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, 1712

FIVE: Collating cobwebs

Yesterday morning the detective rang to see how I’m doing, am I seeing the counsellor, when’s my next session. It was humid and raining but I did the washing anyway. J was at work all day. I forgot the washing and it sat in the machine till evening. I ate fruit.

Lately it’s been necessary to spend much time collating emails. After the detective rang I visited G, who assists in unorthodox ways and to whom my GP turns in times of stress. The calm that came from being in her presence meant I could carry on collating for the rest of the day.

I took my lap top to the cafe and collated. After a while a friend came by and ruffled my hair. The smallest thing, the phone call from the detective, being with G, affection from a friend, can poke holes in the thin tissue of my composure, and then the real breaks through.

Sometimes I see the real as light, like sunlight funnelled through clouds over the river on gloomy days. It’s a strange way to imagine what distress might look like, I know. But there’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

What I had imagined doing for many months was confronting him. I thought if I looked him in the eye and told him what had happened to me that day and ever since, and if he acknowledged it and apologised, I could, as they say, move on. I wouldn’t have done it alone: I would have taken a witness and protector. And then it would not have kept me tied to him, unfinished business of the worst possible kind.

But he would not permit this. It’s probably better this way, others doing it for me with far more authority than I could ever bring to the situation. So he learns men can’t take hold of women when we’ve said, I do not want this.

I look out of the cafe window at my friends who are sitting in the garden drinking their coffee. I wrangle with the problem of what it means that a man can so disregard a woman’s expressed wishes he does take hold of her against her will, because he finds her irresistible.

What it means is that we can never be safe. Who knows when and where some man is going to find you irresistible and bingo, without any warning you’re in a world you never in a million years imagined you’d inhabit, grappling with new language, new customs, new meaning.

Make sure you are never irresistible. Anticipate what it is about you that will contribute to your irresistibility, and nip it in the bud. It is impossible to predict where the assault will come from. A man who publicly boasts of his truthfulness. A man who writes, I treat everyone equally. A man whom others believe to be honourable. All of these qualities in him will be undone by your irresistibility. Yes. Imagine that.

What I would have said to him, among other things, is this: It is not that I am irresistible. It is that you decided you had no obligation to honour my wishes. It is that you decided my desire not to be intimately touched was of far less importance than your desire to intimately touch me.

A man may, when he is an infant, demand to suckle at his mother’s breasts. The man who never learns a woman’s body is not his to feed from by right remains an infant, and dangerous.

I wore that day black jeans, a cream-coloured sweater with a high neck and short sleeves, a short woollen coat and dark brown boots. The inside of his vehicle was dirty and my coat became covered in cobwebs. He thought that amusing but what it meant to me was that he had performed the most intimate acts in an environment that was uncomfortable and dirty, and that I had done my utmost to avoid. That he found the cobwebs on my clothing amusing was a humiliation that signified the greater humiliation of being unable to control where he took me in his vehicle, and what he did when we arrived at our destination.

Oh yes. The cobwebs were so funny. I discovered this phrase in one of the emails I collated. Oh yes, I saw I had written. The cobwebs were so very very funny. I am dying. From mirth.